For Alzheimer's caregivers, self-care comes first

Caregiving for a loved one with dementia can consume your life. But when everything revolves around that person, no time or energy is left to take care of yourself.

That’s bad for both of you, said UC San Diego neuropsychologist Guerry (pronounced “Gary”) M. Peavy. An exhausted person won’t be able to provide the best care, she said. Worse, the caregiver’s own health becomes at risk, raising the chance of cardiovascular disease or even dementia.

But caregivers can tip the odds in their favor by changing their response to stress, Peavy said Saturday at the annual “Date With a Cure” forum held by Alzheimer’s San Diego.

“There are many things that happen that we really don’t have control over, but this (stress response) is one that is modifiable,” said Peavy, who studies Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias at the Shiley-Marcos Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.

Peavy and other local experts spoke before an audience of about 450 at the University of San Diego, up from 300 last year.

Regular exercise, meditation and other strategies reduce the effects of stress, she said. Learning more about Alzheimer’s, along with training on how to provide care also helps, she said.

And simply reaching out to experts to get questions answered — as is done at the forum — helps ease minds.

Alzheimer’s San Diego provides direct assistance to caregivers with its “respite” program. The free service offers support care to caregivers of dementia patients for four hours a week. That’s time to go to a movie, see friends, shop or just sleep.

Other experts on the panel appealed to the public to consider taking part in clinical trials of experimental Alzheimer’s medications. Without such trials, no new Alzheimer’s drug can be discovered.

These trials require a considerable commitment of time, both from volunteers and clinicians, said Dr. Michael Plopper, chief medical officer of Sharp Behavioral Health Services.

“The criteria are fairly strict,” Plopper said in a pre-forum interview. “We want to be able to get the right people into the right studies, to be more likely to determine accurately whether the drug is going to work or not.”

The people who are in most demand are those who appear to be normal, but already have the telltale signs that Alzheimer’s is at work, said Dr. Paul Aisen, director of the USC Alzheimer’s Therapeutic Research Institute, based in San Diego.

These signs are deposits of the toxic proteins beta amyloid and tau, Aisen said. And these can be detected with new brain scan technologies.

Since the brain scans take time and are expensive, researchers would like to pre-screen people to check for subtle signs that cognition has recently begun to decline. The goal is to treat the disease as early as possible, before irrevocable damage is done to the brain.

Aisen said cognitive screens can be done easily from home by taking an online test. Volunteers 50 and older retake the test every three months. If their cognition appears to decline, the volunteers can be more closely examined to see if they qualify for a trial.

This assessment will speed up clinical trials by providing pre-identified volunteers who are ready to go when a trial is launched, Aisen said. This may be of particular interest to family members of those with Alzheimer’s, who may worry if a memory problem is actually a sign of incipient Alzheimer’s.